Shipping reliable software reliably over time is a relentless series of exercises in judgement. What’s risky? What can we write automated tests for? What are we stuck manually testing? Should we release during the day? During off hours?   Compounding the judgement calls, we have the human factors: how do we ensure manual tasks were performed? How do we hit our marks for SOX reporting? How do we maintain our high bar for quality, while maintaining merge velocity?   To riff on the Agilistas, “people over process, everything else is filler”. Instead of forcing the techno/social project of software development into arbitrary, managerially-dictated processes, our keystone for regularly shipping reliable software is to shape processes to our people, empowering them to own and experiment with their processes, and automate where appropriate (back to the judgement calls!).   SeaWorld’s mobile engineering team of 9 ships API, webapp, and native iOS and Android builds to our guests all week long. Join us for a review of the last 18 months of evolution in release management, continuous deployment, absurdly aggressive attempts to shift stakeholders left in engineering workflows, and ultimately a spirited exhortation to experiment with business processes as vigorously as we do with feature development.